Attachment, Sexuality, Pleasure and the Body: A Full-Spectrum Gestalt Approach to Healing and Thriving

Week of February 16-21, 2014

Workshop Details

This workshop is intended as a time of replenishment and inspiration for psychotherapists, sex therapists, and other health professionals. It’s a reminder that the methods that spur our own growth, especially in relationships past and present, add to our therapeutic effectiveness with others.
Though primarily experiential, we begin with an exploration of groundbreaking brain research, studies on attachment, sexology, and the psychology of thriving that are stimulating new directions in therapy. We’ll see how the research corroborates body-based Gestalt therapy and supports a new model for understanding our lives and how people change and thrive. Experiential work includes Gestalt processing; tracking present-centered bodymind experience; breath, movement, and body attunement; visceral and sensory perceptiveness; mindfulness, the practice of relaxed-excitement (autonomic-balance), and the personal experiment.
Four main areas of focus include:
· Attachment and Relationships: How the past is present: Links between preverbal Right Brain, emotional reactivity, attachment style, implicit memory, and nonverbal stress-triggers in intimate relationships
· Embodied Gestalt Processing: Shuttling between cognitive, somatic, and experiential awareness; breath support, focused attention, processing spontaneous imagery, self-attunement
· Sexuality and Pleasure: Sexuality as a core aspect of the self. The love-lust dilemma: links between attachment, early sexual programming, adult intimacy; enhancing capacity to be present to pleasure
· Resilience and Thriving: Practicing skills of presence, self-regulation of stress, partnered mutual-regulation, empathy vs. emotional contagion; How these skills expand intuitiveness, creativity, and effectiveness as a therapist

Workshop Leaders

Stella Resnick, PhD,
psychologist, Gestalt therapist, and certified sex therapist in Beverly Hills, Calif., trains and supervises therapists in her full-spectrum approach to psychotherapy and sex therapy. Her latest book is The Heart of Desire: Keys to the Pleasures of Love.